


Absolution

by Hanna



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Blood Magic, Origins through to Inquisition, guilt complex, ingrid has it pretty bad, snapshots of a life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 12:36:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6079593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hanna/pseuds/Hanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Blight stains Ingrid Surana's soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absolution

**Author's Note:**

> My canon warden is a female Mahariel, but Ingrid is near and dear to my soul. (I just love elves. I admit it.)
> 
> Note that while blood magic is in the tags Ingrid is not a blood mage herself.

**one**

It’s her sixth birthday.

Six is a very important age, Father tells her; six is when you start learning to read and write at the hahren’s school.

(She already knows how to read _and_ write. Her sister taught her before she married and moved away a month ago. She misses Natalie, but everyone says she has a good match. She reads at night on her own now, struggling with the big words sometimes and imagining Natalie ruffling her hair and telling her she’s proud of her when she manages it. When Father tells her off for using the candles up she calls a ball of light into her hand, like she learned she could ages ago. Natalie told her not to show anyone else and to keep it their secret, so she did.)

It’s her sixth birthday and Natalie has sent her a book and a letter. It’s dark and Father hid the candles after the last time she was caught using them so she calls the light into her hand to read it.

_Dearest Ingrid_ she reads, _how I wish I were there with you. You’re six now! My big girl. Be good for Father, and the hahren, and remember that even though I’m not there our secret is still a secret. I love you so very much._

The book is a book of tales and she can’t wait to start reading it but she’s tired now and puts it aside carefully. She hears footsteps and extinguishes the light too late.

“Ingrid Surana, what have I told you about using candles?” Father asks and stares at her when he realises she has no candle, dawning horror on his face.

It’s her sixth birthday and the Templars are taking her away as she cries, Natalie’s letter and her book on her bed despite her best efforts to take both.

 

**two**

It’s her tenth birthday.

They don’t celebrate birthdays at the Circle except with their closest friends, and so she shares the cake the First Enchanter gave her with Jowan who is four years older than her but her only friend. He insists that she has the bigger half.

She can barely concentrate on her lessons that day and gets rapped across the knuckles by the Chantry Sister for it. She wants to go swim in the lake and wonders if the First Enchanter will give her a pass for her birthday as well as a cake.

She won’t even mind the Templars watching her.

She gets a letter from Natalie and tucks it carefully into her tunic, close to her heart.

_Dearest Ingrid_ it begins as they all do, _how my heart aches to think of you growing up in that place. You should be free to live your own life. I know you would use your gifts wisely. Happy birthday, my dearest little sister. I love you, always. Eret is well- he is three now, and I tell him of you often. I wish you could see him._

It’s her tenth birthday and she gets a pass from the First Enchanter to swim in the lake under supervision, and as she floats on the surface she doesn’t mind living in the Circle.

 

**three**

It’s her fifteenth birthday and she is sick of being an apprentice.

She wants the right to use magic without supervision, she knows she can control it. But apprentices who get caught using magic without supervision are punished and she doesn’t want to wait three years for her Harrowing to be allowed to.

_Natalie_ she writes _I am thoroughly sick of being an apprentice. I want to use my magic the way I want to, I want to control my own life and I want to go outside the tower without a pass. I want to see you and I want to see Eret. I want to see Father. I want to be free._

Then she burns the letter with a furtive glance around. She knows the rules. She knows what she’s allowed to say and what she isn’t allowed to say, and even being First Enchanter Irving’s favourite won’t exempt her from the rules.

 

**four**

It is her eighteenth birthday and she is grabbed from the dorm by Templars.

They have no armour on and at first she doesn’t realise they _are_ Templars; she struggles until one smacks her and growls at her to be quiet so not to wake up the others and she recognises his voice. Then she is terrified she’s done something wrong.

She doesn’t realise it’s her Harrowing until she’s standing before the bowl of lyrium, First Enchanter Irving and Knight-Commander Gregior.

“Happy birthday to me,” she mutters as she dips her hand into the bowl and falls into the Fade.

 

**five**

They are going to make Jowan Tranquil, and she can’t let that happen. She smiles pleasantly as she plays off her reputation to get a rod of fire and no one questions her, Irving’s favourite and a newly-Harrowed mage besides. It is the first time she has misused it and she feels so guilty.

“Thank you so much for this,” Jowan tells her as Lily smiles wide and grateful and it goes a way towards easing the guilt but she cannot be rid of it. Her friend cannot be a blood mage, the way they all say he is. She’s known him ever since she came to the Circle and she won’t let them make him Tranquil over a rumour.

When they reach the phylactery chamber she can’t help but be wistful that he had found this out a week earlier, that hers was still here. But it isn’t, Jowan is free and she is still bound to the Circle.

When First Enchanter Irving looks at her all disappointed and asks “why didn’t you come to me, child?” she cannot meet his eyes. She is shaken to her core; Jowan is a blood mage and she never saw it, he is her best friend and she never saw that he did truck with demons.

She surrenders herself to the Knight-Commander willingly, and then the Grey Warden conscripts her and she wants to scream as she is pulled away from everything she has ever known.

She writes to Natalie, though she is sure she can never send the letter.

_Natalie_ she writes, _I am such a fool. I betrayed the Maker, I betrayed the Circle and I aided a blood mage._

Duncan leaves her alone to process what has happened, and he could have done nothing better than that.

 

**six**

She has had nightmares for a long time.

She used to have nightmares as a girl of shemlen taking her father away; later she had nightmares of the Templars taking _her_ away. Demons sometimes whisper at her dreams and she understands why they need to be taught away from others, with Templars there in case someone gives in _someone like Jowan_.

But surely there’s a point where you’re strong enough to resist on your own. They aren’t all children, new to their magic and terrified.

She has always had nightmares but now she knows that she barely understands what the word means.

She dreams of archdemons and darkspawn and wakes sweating and thrashing, Alistair watching her with a knowing, sad look.

“It never stops,” he says. “You’ll have them the rest of your life.”

“I just wanted to stay at the Circle,” she says. “I never wanted this.” Alistair’s face twists in confusion.

“Why would you want _that_?” he asks but she doesn’t even try to explain. He was almost a Templar but he never chose it, he’s never seen how well blood mages can hide and she doesn’t trust her own judgement. Not after Jowan fooled her so well.

How can he possibly understand?

 

**seven**

Jowan is in a cell and she stops dead on seeing him.

He is behind the demons and the risen dead- indirectly perhaps, it is young Connor’s fear which summoned the demon but he should have known better, he should have told the Circle of the boy’s power like her father told them of hers. He knows what blood magic does. He was never even a true mage, nothing more than an apprentice. How can he hope to teach a child to use his power?

Still, it is his blood magic that takes power from the boy’s mother’s life and sends her into his mind to confront the demon and free the child, and Arl Eamon gives her the chance to decide Jowan’s fate.

She lets him go, and isn’t sure if it is her friendship clouding her judgement again.

 

**eight**

It is odd, being known by a title that she can barely associate with herself and an order she knows nothing of. All she knows is that she has to save the world. The months pass in a blur, going all the way to the Brecilian Forest to try to negotiate with elves she knows nothing of and who do not welcome her kind and then to Orzammar and being taller than everyone else for the first time in her life, people calling her “Warden” as if the title is supposed to mean something.

Returning to the Circle Tower and seeing it in such a state is hard. Fighting through the Fade once more is harder, and giving up the power to change her shape, to shape the world around her is perhaps the hardest thing she has done.

Her own ambition scares her more than anything else. She is terrified by it. She understands, for the first time, the lure of blood magic.

Her dreams are haunted by demons seeking to tempt her for weeks.

When Morrigan offers to conceive a child by blood magic to save her life she accepts the offer, coerces Alistair into it and does not realise until after the archdemon is dead what a stain she has put upon her soul.

She seeks out the nearest Chantry and prays for hours, but she cannot clear her conscience.

 

**nine**

It is her nineteenth birthday and she is called the Hero of Ferelden.

She does not deserve the title.

She drinks alone, drinks far too much and throws up after, weeps for the girl she used to be and turns herself into the Circle. They reject her.

“You are a Grey Warden now,” Irving tells her. “We have no more hold on you.”

That is what scares her the most. She knows the depths she fell to without guidance, and is terrified by how much further there is to fall.

 

**ten**

She is promoted to Warden Commander of Ferelden and sent to Amaranthine. She tries very hard to make the title mean something to her. She spends the next three years trying to make the title mean something to her, to find pride in it but all she can find is condemnation and all she can see is the blood- the blood _magic_ \- staining her hands.

She cannot meet her own eyes in the mirror.

She leaves the Wardens behind and spends the next several years hiding from everyone she once knew, travelling Thedas. She sees wonderful things, but none of them seem important when she wakes each night with blood staining her soul.

At least in Nevarra and Antiva people do not know who she is.

 

**eleven**

She is alone when the Calling starts. She does not question it though it is early, starts preparing to go into the Deep Roads. It’s an ignominious end and no one will know. It is all she deserves.

When she meets Wardens hearing the same Calling she starts to get suspicious. It isn’t supposed to happen for twenty more years for her, and it certainly doesn’t happen to all of them at once.

For the first time in seven years she goes to the Wardens to find them with a Tevinter magister and preparing to use blood magic to end the Blights for good. She did the same thing a lifetime ago.

It makes her sick.

But they won’t listen to her and she is forced to flee her own, the Calling getting louder every day as she seeks a cure for the music in her head, to cure all of them and it feels _right_ , she starts to feel absolved of her past wrongs. It does not escape her notice that saving the very order that ruined her is her redemption.

She understands them, the mistakes they are making. She knows the fear driving them into this intimately. And she can look at herself in the mirror again and see more than a failure.

The Inquisition seeks her out she writes back to them, apologises for her absence and tells them she is seeking her own solution to the problem and that she cannot help them with Corypheus.

(She was not a Warden long enough to hear more about him than his name, and considered too young despite her deeds to be senior enough. She wishes now she had learned more.)

She wishes she had the courage to write a personal letter to Leliana, but it’s been too long and they could barely be called friends to start with.

 

**twelve**

She finds the Separation too late.

The Calling does not cease and the Wardens are banished from Orlais for their crimes. She cannot say she does not understand, that she would not have done the same. She cannot salvage her order’s reputation.

But she can use the Separation and stop the song that she finds herself humming when she is not careful.

It is as painful as the Joining was, and the resounding silence in her head is just as deafening as the Calling was. She curls up for days barely able to get out of her bedroll after.

The nightmares stop.

The faint echo of them remains, memories of nightmares but they are dreams that she can dismiss and do not wake her screaming and sweating. She can sleep for the first time in ten years.

She is no longer a Warden.

It’s funny that after all this time that the title meant little to her the loss of it is a searing pain.

 

**thirteen**

She is still likely infertile, the healer tells her. The Blight has been part of her too long. The news is expected and does not hurt. She never planned to have children and pass on her curse. She is likely to have a shortened lifespan despite the Separation, though maybe not so short as it would have been.

She has no idea who she is now.

She long since got used to not being a Circle mage, but to no longer be a Warden is something she is sure she will never get used to. Even if she did want to go back to the Circle now she could not; they are dissolved by mage vote.

She will ever be the Hero of Ferelden. It is a title she still denies.

She goes to Weishaupt with the Separation and is greeted as a Warden despite the fact she can no longer be called one and finds comfort in it for the first time.

“You are still a Warden,” a dwarven woman tells her. “So maybe you can’t kill another archdemon. You were a Warden even when you left the order, and a Warden you remain. Any who decide to take the Separation are still welcome here.”

“If I never see another archdemon again I will die happy,” she replies and the dwarf laughs heartily and, for the first time in ten years, so does she.


End file.
